This Tuesday, the HLN host revealed on his personal blog that he is a cancer survivor after fighting the disease for the past years, writing:

While many of you were celebrating the Fourth of July, I was at home on my couch recovering from a radical robotic prostatectomy. Four hours of surgery had left me in great pain, without an appetite, and in need of help from my college-age son, Jordan, to get up and lie down. But I was cancer-free for the first time in at least two years.

Prostate cancer is a stealth disease. It rarely announces its presence. It can simmer for a long time without coming to a boil. A low-grade tumor can remain just that, for a very long time.

The American board-certified internist added that he wanted to open up personally to shed light on the matter and encourage men to get check-ups regularly.

“Why am I telling you this? I want you to hear it from me. Not from the Internet. Not from a gossip column. Not from someone who doesn’t know me,” he continued. “And I want to make you aware. Men, you are likely to get prostate cancer. The odds are you will if you live long enough. When you do, don’t freak out. You don’t need to take action today. In many cases, time is on your side.”

He explained, “I’m relatively young. I have a wife. I have three children in college. I didn’t want cancer coming back. So I had a radical robotic prostatectomy in early July 2013.”

“I’m grateful this was a detectable, survivable cancer,” he added. “I’m pleased that the judgment and intuition of my physicians were spot-on every step of the way.”

Dr. Drew Pinsky has encouraged people not to sit in judgement of Lindsay Lohan — and instead offer prayer for the troubled Hollywood starlet.

Following Lohan’s latest drama — she was arrested for fighting with a woman in a New York nightclub on Nov. 29 — the renowned addiction specialist, who hosts Dr. Drew on HLN and VH1’s Rehab, admitted he was worried for the Liz & Dick star.

“We need to pray for her and not point, or hold her in disdain,” he told Celebuzz at the CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute in Los Angeles on Sunday, Dec. 2.

“We need to hope that she makes it to through this to some kind of sobriety, some day. The big question is how much it is going to take.”

Explaining 26-year-old Lohan’s repeated denials that she needs to seek treatment, Dr. Drew added: “This is what denial is all about.”

He said, “Denial makes people not perceive the consequences, not see the relationship between what they’re doing, or see their role in all of it.”

“More often than not it is some sort of horrible, horrible event that gets through — a near death experience, loss of freedom or loss of children — those kinds of things.

“But some people just have a spiritual awakening — and I pray for that, for her.”

Dr. Drew is board-certified in internal medicine and addiction medicine, though he does not treat Lohan.

“I know her parents are very, very concerned about her and well they should be,” Dr. Drew said. “An adult child with big issues is really hard to deal with.”

Dr. Drew Pinsky has praised the network airing his new reality television show, Rehab With Dr. Drew, for spending thousands of dollars to treat patients — even after the program has stopped shooting.

The genre of television programming has come under fire about the issue of aftercare for contestants and subjects, in the wake of the suicide of Russell Armstrong, the estranged spouse of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Taylor Armstrong, was found dead in August 2011, at the age of 47.

The network was criticized for not doing enough to help out the oft-troubled Armstrong.

“It (aftercare) doesn’t exist, but it does exist for Rehab patients,” Dr. Drew said in an interview on Thursday’s episode of The Daily Buzz, a live webcast on Celebuzz. “It is necessary. The one point I make is, ‘This is just the beginning, guys. This is where you are started.’ The process takes a year or so to get a recovery underway.

“Because these regular people are more addictive, more severe addicts that celebrities — this really is a severe group — VH1 obliged.”

Dr. Drew, a nationally renowned addiction medicine specialist, returns to the airwaves of VH1 on Sunday for season six of his hit show. But this time, there’s a twist with his popular warts-and-all style documentary series: Treating celebrities has been shelved and instead eight regular folks are in.

Why did the doctor cut the stars loose — for now?

“It is something I always wanted to do,” he said. “The original notion I had when they approached me about doing Celebrity Rehab was, ‘What a great idea, why don’t we put regular people in with celebrities to make the point that we treat everybody the same… That didn’t end up happening, of course.

“But finally I am getting a chance to show what Bob (Forrest), Shelley (Sprague) and I do normally — treat people like you and I, regular people. It turned out to be a very intense experience.”

“We are still struggling with the patients to this day,” he said. “They are all sober — six of them are in sober living — and it is a group that needs a lot of treatment.”

“I keep telling VH1, I wish they would take a bow. They have gone to the map on behalf of these patients repeatedly, funding their ongoing care. No one ever sees that part. VH1 has very kindly supported that, whenever I have asked for more treatment.”

The series is confronting, even depicting hardcore drug use — as the video preview above shows.

When asked why it is important to show drug use, Dr. Drew said: “To me, it is matter of fact — that’s their condition. These are drug addicts, they do drugs. People need to be hit between the eyes about this disease because, in our country, it is one of the diseases of our time. It is a very serious problem.”

Dr. Drew — who also hosts the HLN nightly show Dr. Drew and radio program Loveline — also addressed criticism of the reality television treatment, in the wake of the deaths of series’ alumni Joey Kovar, who died of a drug overdose and Rodney King, who was in a “state of drug and alcohol induced delirium” when he passed away, according to the official toxicology report.

In the wake of the deaths, one media outlet even chided Dr. Drew as being “officially the grim reaper.”

“If someone has severe enough addiction that they need to see me, the prognosis is bad,” Dr Drew responded.

“They have a life threatening condition. I am like an oncologist. If we were doing a show on cancer, severe life threatening cancer, and we did everything we could, but people died, people would say (the cause) was cancer. Because it is addiction, people somehow go ‘You should have been able to cure that, or people should have stopped.’ No, the reality is, bad addiction has a worse prognosis than the majority of cancer. People don’t get that.

“My patients die, in spite of everything we do. If they don’t continue to do the daily work, there life is in jeopardy.”

But he added, “There are miracles and surprises every day in addiction and that is what keeps me going.”

Watch The Daily Buzz above for which celebrity Dr. Drew thinks is his best success story and watch Rehab With Dr. Drew on VHI Sunday night at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

Following her debut Senior TV Editor Jethro Nededog praised Spears, as she has “clearly grown up, weathered the travails of a recording career that spanned more than a decade and found a unique – if not a more broad – view of the world.”

But will it be enough to win over everyone?

Our panel discusses Spear’s debut performance as a TV judge.

What else is in the show?

In today’s episode, Dr. Drew is shaking things up, saying so long to celebrities in rehab and hello to an all new gritty series, which is likely to leave many viewers shocked.

Opening up to Celebuzz’s Dylan Howard the addiction specialist reveals why he leave the famous behind? And, why Dr. Drew thinks America needs to open its eyes to the issues on his new television show.

We’ll have all the details behind Demi Lovato‘s tabloid fued. Why is the pop star fighting mad over headlines suggesting royal Kate Middleton is pregnant?

In the wake of Jersey Shore star Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino confirming he is in a drug rehab program “to get control of a prescription medication problem I had due to exhaustion,” HLN anchor and daytime talk-show host, Dr. Drew Pinsky, examines the go-to alibi that’s been used by for a host of stars, including actress’ Demi Moore and Lindsay Lohan.

One of my goals in choosing to participate in mass media is to help viewers and listeners wade through the nonsense that is fed to them and help them become more sophisticated consumers of media. As a physician one of the most transparent and troubling lies that I see spun from publicists and then distributed as legitimate news is when a young public figure becomes ill. What we hear from the spin doctors is that the young client is suffering from “exhaustion” and/or “dehydration.”

Now, I am not suggesting that merely because someone is a public figure he or she is not entitled to confidentiality as it pertains to health care. Of course they are entitled to that, but please, stop lying to us!

Just report that the individual is under doctor’s care and will be expected to return to work soon. Stop with the ridiculous spin. The public is too smart for this and deserves better. Young people run marathons, play competitive and extreme sports. They rarely need medical attention and when they do it is for very specific definable medical reasons. There simply is no such diagnostic category as exhaustion.

Hospitals have very stringent admitting criteria that are reviewed by governmental and private agencies. This assures that hospitals maintain a certain standard of care. This is required for hospitals to maintain their licensure and standing. So they cannot admit a young healthy individual for being tired! Psychiatric hospitals are held to the same standards. There must be some identified medical diagnosis that meets criteria to need hospitalization.

So when you hear or read that someone has been hospitalized for exhaustion or dehydration immediately read that as a lie. If this is a young person under say 30 years of age most of these fabrications are covering for addiction. After 30 it can be addiction or alcoholism but many times this is also a cover for a Psychiatric illness. Somewhat of an exception has been the recent example of Jason Russell, whose family stepped forward and reported that Jason’s recent public breakdown was the result of Reactive Psychosis.

I am certain that this is in fact what his family was initially told about Jason’s condition and they should be commended for being so forthcoming and honest. The episode looked to have been a Manic episode related to Bipolar Disorder although it may well have been a reactive psychosis. The irony here is that Reactive Psychosis begs the question, reactive to what?

This still leaves open the possibility of spinning this story as reactive to… guess what, stress and exhaustion. Reactive Psychosis is rather unusual and is more common in those with Personality Disorders or a family history of Bipolar Disorder. They are actually reporting something rather complex about his Psychiatric status but because it is anchored to story about exhaustion and stress somehow it seems more palatable to the spin doctors.

Bottom line is that celebrities are no different from the rest of us. They suffer the very same psychiatric and medical problems that afflict us all. Paying attention to the reality of the lives that we all watch play out in public has the potential to teach us. Consuming media in a sophisticated manner can provide opportunities to teach our children by looking at the example of others. Celebrity stories can also be cautionary tales from which each of us can learn more medical and psychiatric realities of the human experience.

Dr. Drew Pinsky is a nationally renowned addiction medicine specialist, the host of HLN’s primetime Dr.Drew on HLN (9pm ET & PT) and Dr. Drew’s Lifechangers on the CW. He can also be heard on the nationally syndicated “Loveline” radio program.

After months — actually, years — of bickering back-and-forth at each other, Lindsay Lohan seems to have buried the hatchet with Dr. Drew Pinsky.

Lohan, who has often shot back at the celebrity doctor after his many public comments regarding her safety and health, was taking quite a bit of flak from the media in the run-up to (and even after) her court date on Wednesday in which she pleaded not guilty to felony theft charges. Drew, normally one to call out Lindsay’s shortcomings, took to her defense, declaring on Twitter:

I a mortified how @Lindsaylohan is getting attacked when she is so fragile and just establishing her sobriety. Not at all what she needs

Just a few hours later, Lohan responded to the message, saying: “@drdrew thank you for your support.. I appreciate it.”
The war of words between the two hit a fevered pitch over the summer, when Lohan’s alleged substance abuse problems resurfaced in the media. After commenting publicly about her condition despite not ever treating her, Lohan and her family called out Dr. Drew for his actions. He later apologized, telling HollyScoop: “The things I have said for instance that have seemed to caused her to get the most upset was when I was speculating what I would do if my daughter were behaving the way she was. She seems to be fine right now and I hope she continues to do well.”

Conservatives and anti-drug groups are piling up against Miley Cyrus after a video surfaced last week of the teen star smoking salvia out of a bong.

Bill O’Reillyslammed the “Can’t Be Tamed” songbird for her now-infamous bong hit on Monday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor. Bill called the 18-year-old entertainer “pathetic” and said that her days of being a positive role models are “long gone.” Yikes!

This isn’t the first time that Bill has criticized Miley. The Fox News pundit held a news conference in 2008 to speak out against leaked sexy photos of the then-underage star.

“We have so few role models, particularly for little girls in this country and she is the main one,” Bill said after the photos leaked online, “I hate to see this. Parents all over the country like this girl because she is clean-cut.”

Bill isn’t the only person who is ripping Miley for getting caught smoking the legal herbal substance. Dr. Drew Pinskycriticized Miley (and her parents) and said that she should “get professional help immediately”.

Miley has also been hit hard by California State Assemblyman Anthony Adams, who used Miley’s giggly salvia video to push for a ban on the legal substance.

“Miley is a star and young kids are going to emulate her behavior,” Anthony said. “It’s time for state and federal governments to renew their push toward an outright ban.”

Miley’s own father, Billy Ray Cyrus has also aired his feelings about Miley’s salvia video. “Im so sad,” Billy tweeted on Friday. “There is much beyond my control right now.”

Lindsay Lohan might not be participating, but rest assured: When Dr. Drew Pinsky hangs out his shingle once again for the fourth season of Celebrity Rehab, an entertaining time for all is virtually guaranteed.

VH1 has revealed the participants for its latest round of detox at the Pasadena Recovery Center, and its quite the mixed bag of substance abusers. Along with previously revealed participant Jeremy London, the Party of Five actor who earlier this year claimed to have been abducted and forced to smoke drugs at gunpoint, the season will feature Laguna Beach vet and multiple DUI arrestee Jason Wahler; alleged Tiger Woods mistress Rachel Uchitel; former teen heartthrob Leif Garrett (most recently busted for heroin possession in February); socialite Jason Davis; former America’s Next Top Model judge Janice Dickinson; and Frankie Lons, mother of singer Keyshia Cole.

No word on who will come out on top in this televised race to recovery, but monetarily, Rachel Uchitel already seems to be the clear winner; according to TMZ, Rachel—who reportedly hopes to kick a pill habit while on the series—will be collecting $500,000 for her troubles, after the show’s producers agreed to double their offer when she initially declined.

Are you looking forward to the new season of Celebrity Rehab? Anybody you think they unfairly left out? Let us know in the comments section.

If the rumors of the casting for the upcoming season of Celebrity Rehab are anything to go by, it looks like the people behind the show should just cast whoever starred in a MTV reality show during the mid-2000s.

The former Laguana Beach star has had more than a few troubles as a result of his reported drug and alcohol abuse, including several DUIs and arrests, so it seems like he is a pretty obvious choice to check into rehab with Dr. Drew.

What other MTV reality stars could Celebrity Rehab be casting for their show? The well of addicted reality stars probably runs pretty deep.

While we would all love to give Dina Lohan some parenting advice when it comes to her paycheck–er, daughter–and perennial train-wreck, Lindsay Lohan, we don’t really think that Dr. Drew Pinsky has the best advice when it comes to dealing with Lindsay’s many, many problems.

The Celebrity Rehab addiction specialist told RadarOnline some of his rather interesting parenting ideas when it comes to dealing with Lindsay. From RadarOnline:

If she were my daughter, I would pack her car full with illegal substances, send her on her way, call the police, and make sure she was arrested. I would make sure she was not allowed to get out of jail. I would then go to the judge and make sure she was ordered to a minimum of a three year sobriety program.

Ok, so you would frame your daughter for drug possession and then throw her in the clink? Look, we are all for sending Lindsay to rehab but framing her for a crime is taking things to extremes. That’s up there with Crazy Facebook Mom status.

However, Dr. Drew continued his plea to Lindsay with some rather poignant advice:

I would say it’s less than a 1% chance of her making the decision to go to rehab. I have said this many times before, I believe that Lindsay will make a wonderful sober person, someday, if she survives this. I absolutely wish no harm to her, but I just have a feeling that something awful is going to happen to her, like she is going to lose a limb. I hope Lindsay gets help before something terrible happens.

Yes, it is probably very unlikely that Lindsay would be willing to go to rehab on her own. And even if she does decide to go to rehab she will have to work very hard on committing to a sober lifestyle.

However, we think that losing a limb is probably not the worst thing that could happen to Lindsay, considering how her life is going.

• Jessica Alba reportedly hates her neck tattoo and is having it removed. Don’t we all regret the trashy flower tattoos we got on a drunken night we were 18-years-old at a dirty tattoo parlor in Huntington Beach? (Celebslam)

• Have you ever found yourself wondering, “Hey, what does Dr. Drew think about these Jesse James/Tiger Woods scandals?” Well, now you know! (PopEater)

• A woman on a bus reportedly diagnosed Woody Harrelson as lactrose intolerant. We love getting all of our medical evaluations from strangers on public transportation. (Starpulse)

• The Real Housewives of Atlanta star NeNe Leakes was spotted working a stripper pole at a gay club. No words in the last sentence are surprising to us. (Bossip)

• Actor Jim Belushi had police waiting to arrest him in Las Vegas after he reportedly had an altercation with a flight attendant. So he moved on from terrorizing comedy to terrorizing the friendly skies? (Hufftington Post)

Celebrity Rehab host Dr. Drew Pinsky, who knows a thing or two about the workings of addiction, says that DJ AM—who was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment at the age of 36—most likely began using illicit drugs again because of the pain medications he was taking following his 2008 plane crash.

“It very slowly and subtly reawakens addiction,” Pinsky says, according to Popeater. “I’m not saying it was inappropriately prescribed, I’m saying he didn’t know the risks.”

When police found DJ AM (aka Adam Goldstein)—who struggled with addiction for years but had claimed that he had long been sober—they found a crack pipe, a bag half full of prescription bottles, and prescription pills near his body.

In an interview with Playboy, the good doc of Celebrity Rehab, Drew Pinsky, talked about how a celebrity’s public behavior can often display tell-tale evidence of “childhood trauma.”

“Take a guy like Tom Cruise. Why would somebody be drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology? To me, that’s a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood—maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect,” Drew told the skin mag.

As a case in point, a recent report claims that Cruise owns an entire fleet of cars that are both bomb and bulletproof. According to a source who chatted with In Touch, “Tom’s vehicles look perfectly normal, but in reality they are more like armored trucks.”

It doesn’t take an esteemed Loveline panelist to diagnose this as a mild case of paranoia.

Tom’s sharp-toothed lawyer Bert Fields countered Dr. Drew’s professional opinion through Page Six. “This unqualified television performer who is obviously just looking for notoriety is so grotesquely unprofessional as to pretend to diagnose Tom and others without ever meeting them. He seems to be spewing the absurdity that all Scientologists are mentally ill. The last time we heard garbage like this was from Joseph Goebbels.”

That wacky Dr. Drew, implying that individuals who join cults that systematically program their members to slowly, but surely turn over emotional and financial control of their person to a “religion” based on the teachings of a science-fiction writer is just … too damn logical for his own good.

Oh, yes, and probably also participating in genocide in his free time.